The Line Item Most Owners Never Budget For
A monthly VA fee is easy to compare against another monthly VA fee. What is harder to see coming is the cost that shows up only after a hire turns out to be a bad one, both the cost of replacing that person and the cost of whatever damage they caused while still on the phones.
Both of those costs are documented, sourced numbers, not guesswork, and both are worth pricing before assuming a cheap monthly rate is the cheap option.
What SHRM’s $5,475 Cost-Per-Hire Figure Covers
SHRM’s 2025 Benchmarking Report, released October 15, 2025, puts the average cost-per-hire at $5,475 for a non-executive role, the category a replacement cold-calling VA falls into, and $35,879 for an executive-level role. That figure represents sourcing, screening, and onboarding a replacement, the direct administrative cost of the hiring process itself.
It does not include the weeks of reduced or missing call volume while a replacement gets trained, and it does not include anything the underperforming VA did or failed to do while still in the seat. It is the floor of the cost, not the ceiling.
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Book a Real Estate Fit CallThe Liability a Careless Caller Creates Per Violation
The bigger, less predictable exposure sits in TCPA statutory damages. A standard, non-willful TCPA violation carries a $500 penalty, and a court can treble that figure to as much as $1,500 per violation if the conduct was knowing or willful, under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(3).
The word "per" is doing real work in that sentence. Damages are assessed per call or per message, not per campaign or per client, and there is no statutory cap on how high the aggregate total can climb across a batch of noncompliant calls.
Why TCPA Exposure Has No Ceiling
A VA calling numbers without proper consent scrubbing, ignoring Do Not Call flags, or dialing outside permitted hours is not creating a single risk. Each individual call that violates the rule is its own separate $500 to $1,500 exposure, and a caller working through even a modest daily list can generate dozens of those exposures in a single shift without anyone noticing until a complaint or an audit surfaces the pattern.
That is the structural reason this liability dwarfs a replacement-hire cost so easily. SHRM’s $5,475 figure is one number, capped by the nature of the hiring process itself. TCPA exposure multiplies by every call, with no equivalent cap built into the statute, so a short stretch of noncompliant dialing can already outrun what a full month of that VA’s fee was ever going to cost you.
Pricing a Bad Hire Against the Fee You Are Comparing It To
A cheaper monthly rate on a cold-calling VA only looks cheaper if nothing goes wrong. Once a bad hire is priced against SHRM’s $5,475 average replacement cost on the low end, and against TCPA’s uncapped, per-violation exposure on the high end, the monthly fee difference between two VA options stops being the number that decides which one is actually cheaper.
Neither figure requires assuming the worst about a given VA. It only requires recognizing that the true comparison between two calling options was never just two monthly invoices sitting side by side, but two very different risk profiles hiding behind those invoices.
VA Horizon’s callers and in-house SDR are trained on documented consent standards specifically so this exposure does not become part of the real cost of the engagement.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- SHRM, "SHRM Releases 2025 Benchmarking Reports"
- Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 47 U.S. Code § 227